Experience & log
For my measuring me take 2, I decided to track whenever I engaged in negative self talk – “I can’t do this”, “I’m dumb,” “this is too hard for me,” as a few examples, but anything of the sort/sentiment. I didn’t think it would make sense to do this over a regular interval since I noticed that I primarily engage in such behaviors whenever I’m trying to finish a task deemed challenging (i.e. finishing a difficult pset, trying to understand lecture content, etc) and not when I’m casually grabbing coffee with a friend or relaxing on my bed. So, over 2 days, I decided to record whenever I would notice myself saying something negative about myself and also recorded what situational context I was in, deduce some patterns and trends in my behavior.
Over the two days, I noticed myself engaging in such behaviors primarily in the afternoon – the most common theme was when I was performing what would be considered “challenging” such as finishing a PSET, studying for tests/interviews, or recapping lecture material for difficult classes. However, to my surprise, I also noticed myself commonly engaging in such behaviors when I was talking to friends, which made me realize that my inclination towards comparing myself to others was consequently bringing myself down (i.e. comparing myself to peers never made me feel better). This led me to create two models depicting circumstantial and internal causes surrounding this behavior: a Connection Circle and a causality loop.
Models
What I would do differently & final takeaways:
Similar to the measuring me assignment part 1 from last week, I noticed myself intentionally trying to change my behavior (i.e. last week, I noticed myself wanting to be more proactive so I could log more hours as “working” or “studying). If I could do this again next time, I think I would also log moments where I was inclined or wanted to engage in negative self talk, but intentionally chose not to. I think this would be significant and more accurately reflect my every day behavior that go without logging, and would offer me more datapoints for me to see patterns and trends. Overall, the assignment was extremely insightful to see how much of a certain behavior I was truly doing throughout the day — I had always been cognizant of the action, but never had the chance to exactly see when and how many times I was doing it until now.
